


Desolation Comes Upon The Sky

by aewgliriel



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 14:25:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13683522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aewgliriel/pseuds/aewgliriel
Summary: Cassian learns something devastating from a Bothan spy and has to figure out how to tell Jyn.Written for lionkingauston for the 2018 RebelCaptain Secret Valentine exchange on Tumblr. The prompt was “History repeats itself and we can never win”. Angst was requested, and angst is delivered!





	Desolation Comes Upon The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from “I See Fire” by Ed Sheeran.

_Somewhere between Verdanth and Ragna_

_4ABY_

Bothan blood, Cassian Andor reflects, is just as red as human but somehow stickier. At least, it seems that way as he unclenches his fist and pries the data stick out of it as Jyn announces that they’re in hyperspace and away.

She stands in the doorway to the small ship’s only cabin, the place they’ve called home for most of the last year since the evacuation of Hoth. Since Draven died, Madine stepped in as general over Intelligence, and Cassian was promoted to colonel. Since Solo went missing and Skywalker had his hand chopped off by a Sith and everything went to hell.

“You alright?” Jyn asks quietly. “I’m guessing that blood’s not yours.”

Cassian looks down at the shocking amount of it soaking his shirt. “No. I… No. My contact was wounded. I had to… He wouldn’t make it, so I had to…”

She steps close, hand hovering over his shoulder but not touching. He doesn’t blame her. He looks like the sole survivor of a slaughter, though he’d only seen the aftermath of one. “You were doing him a favour,” she remarks. “The Empire wouldn’t have been quick.”

“They weren’t,” he says, after a moment. “That’s why he was bleeding out in my hands.”

She hasn’t noticed the data stick, and he doesn’t call attention to it. Not yet. Not with the dying spy’s words rolling around in his head like they are.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he says.

Jyn wrinkles her nose. “Yeah. That would be good. You hungry?”

“No,” he sighs. “I could use some caf, though.”

She nods. “I can do that.”

Cassian waits until she leaves before fetching his datapad, the one loaded with decryption programs. He cleans the blood off the input end of the data stick and plugs it in, takes the datapad into the ‘fresher to run while he showers.

It takes longer than he’d like to get clean. He wrenched his back during his flight from where he’d left the dead Bothan, and the old injury from Scarif feels like a hot metal rod in place of his spine. The water from the on-board recycler smells metallic, which doesn’t help the nausea rolling in his gut from the stench of blood.

Finally, he decides he’s as clean as he’s going to get right then, because if he has to stand for one more second under the stream of hot, metal-smelling water, he’s going to vomit. He stumbles out, grabs one of the two lone towels in their possession, and dries off as he eyes the progress of the decryption. It’s almost done.

When it reaches 100%, he drops the towel on the floor and opens the file, too worried about what would cause the capture and execution of a ship of three hundred Bothans by Imperial hands to be concerned over mere nakedness.

When he reads the report, Cassian drops to his knees on the ‘fresher floor, leans over the toilet, and throws up anyway.

——-

The little ship has become more home than anywhere else Jyn has ever known, the longest place she’s had to rest her head since she was sixteen. She’s used to the sounds of it now: the hum of the hyperdrive, the rumble of the sublights when they drop into realspace, the sound of the water recycler kicking in. They need to drain out the old and get a fresh supply, she thinks as she pours caf out for Cassian. They’ve been running on the one tank for four straight months and “stale” doesn’t begin to describe it these days.

A new sound interrupts the quiet, and it takes her a moment to place the faint noise as … crying? Cassian’s the only other person on board, and it’s a really good thing they like each other, because as cramped as everything is, there’s no such thing as personal space between them unless they’re in separate areas. She hasn’t heard him crying since the awful days after Scarif, when they were both broken and hurting, physically and emotionally. He hadn’t even cried when Draven died, and that man had basically been a father to him.

Had the mission been that bad? She’d stayed with the ship because it wasn’t a good idea to leave any craft unattended where they’d landed, and it was his contact they were meeting. If he’s crying now, she thinks, he must have seen something truly awful.

The blood on his clothes would indicate that, but Jyn knows from experience that there are worse things to witness than bloodshed.

She steps into their cabin—the layout is simple on their little ship, with engines aft, cockpit fore, cargo hold port, galley/lounge/medical centre, and cabin starboard—and takes the three steps to the refresher door opposite the foot of the bed. Jyn hesitates, heart constricting at the muffled sounds he’s clearly trying to quell. Then she raps lightly. The crying stops.

“Cassian? Are you alright?”

It takes a moment, but he replies, voice thick, “Fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

She retreats to give him the illusion of space and takes both caf mugs to the minuscule table with two built in seats crammed between the cook station over the conservator and the door to the engine room.

Cassian’s always been wound tightly, from the stress of his work in the Alliance, but the last few weeks, chasing the rumours that the Empire’s planning something nasty again, has him not sleeping, the bags under his eyes turning to dark bruises of exhaustion. She worries, but doesn’t know how to help him. It’s not like he avoids confiding in her or anything. They share more than had made Draven comfortable.

She smiles faintly at the plain metal band on her finger, the only jewellery she wears besides her mother’s crystal, and remembers that she has Cassian’s on her necklace. He takes it off only when doing things like today.

Jyn’s just pulling it off the necklace when her husband comes in, his pallor making his brown beard look black against his skin. He’s carrying his datapad, and his expression is worse than when K-2SO was destroyed on Scarif.

Cassian drops into the seat across from her and stares with unfocused eyes at the caf in front of him, not touching it. His dark eyes are rimmed with red and his cheeks are covered with undisguised tear tracks.

Jyn reaches across to him, though his hands are in his lap and she can’t touch him. “What happened?”

The bleak devastation in his eyes when he looks up frightens her. “My contact with Bothawui sent an emergency request to meet. He was involved with their spy network. The Empire captured one of their larger ships, dragged them here and tortured them. The entire crew. My contact played dead and was tossed out with the rest of them. He’d swallowed a data stick. He… was dying when I found him but he’d held on, but he’d … Oh, kriff. Jyn, he’d cut it out of …”

Cassian flattens his hands on the table to try to stop their shaking. “He used a vibroblade. He was barely alive when I found him. He told me they found something. They were tracking Imperial shipments. A lot of them. Every Imperial factory is working overtime to produce. They’re strip mining every usable material from every planet they can. It’s big.”

He swallows hard, shakes his head. “There’s a planet in the Unknown Regions, called Ilum. The Empire’s basically hollowed it out. They’ve got a refinery on the surface, but…”

Jyn feels her skin grow cold as all the blood drains out of it. This all sounds familiar. Too familiar. “What are they building, Cassian?”

He shakes his head again, harder this time. “I can’t…”

“What are they refining on Ilum?” she demands, though part of her already knows.

“Kyber,” he whispers, and the bottom falls out of her world. “They’re building another one, Jyn. Bigger. So much bigger.”

“No,” she says , even as she reaches for his datapad. He doesn’t stop her trembling hands from grasping it, turning the screen back on to read the Bothan report that’s still open.

“Bigger” is an understatement. The weapon array dish alone is the size of the entire first station.

What destruction could this one wreak on the galaxy?

His eyes are on her face. “I’m sorry,” he says.

It’s like staring at the ghost of her father’s monster, only this time, so much worse. She’d thought this had died on Scarif, leaving just her one terrible half-sibling for the Rebellion to destroy. How have they resurrected this thing? Does it still have the same flaw, without her father to sabotage it?

The familiar, comforting sounds of the ship are suddenly too loud, and Jyn claps her hands over her ears to try to shut them out. But then all she can hear is the rush of her own blood as her heart pounds in terror.

She doesn’t realise she’s keening until Cassian drags her out of her seat and into his lap, the two of them huddled on the floor with his arms tight around her.

“We can’t win,” she tells him desperately. “They’ll just keep at it, rebuilding it again and again, bigger and bigger, until we can’t throw enough at it to stop them.”

She leans into him, too overwhelmed for tears, as their little ship hurtles them through space towards their rendezvous point with the Alliance.

He buries his face against her neck and says nothing.


End file.
